Paul L. Ellingson

Paul Lloyd Ellingson was born in 1938 in Menomonie, Wisconsin. This Salt Lake City master of watercolor had been one of the most interesting people thinking and working in Utah. He died in 2005.

Ellingson graduated in 1965 from the University of Utah with a B.F.A., in architecture and music, and an M.F.A., in painting in 1970. Ellingson was also an architectural theorist whose concept of the "continumorph" is fascinating and perhaps a landmark in the evolution of environmental-design thinking.

Paul Ellingson as artist maintained his position as an admirable painter of watercolors that are refreshingly economic as a set of low-key suggestion of the landscape, and as an effective teacher of the same, sometimes at the Salt Lake Art Center and sometimes at the University of Utah.

Paul Lloyd Ellingson (1938-2005), was originally from Menomonie, Wisconsin. This Salt Lake City master of watercolor had been one of the most interesting people thinking and working in Utah. A graduate of the University of Utah (B.F.A., architecture and music, 1965; M.F.A., painting, 1970). Ellingson became a fine jazz pianist and music company executive, an architectural theorist whose concept of the "continumorph" is fascinating and perhaps a landmark in the evolution of environmental-design thinking, and a painter who understands the watercolor medium better than most of his colleagues do. His dream had been of an ideal natural world made up of "continumorphs ... morphologically related" via symbiosis. Yet, while the details for such a new landscape and architecture have tended to remain vague in the awareness of most of those to whom they have been presented, Paul Ellingson as artist maintained his position as an admirable painter of watercolors that are refreshingly economic as a set of low-key suggestion of the landscape, and as an effective teacher of the same, sometimes at the Salt Lake Art Center and sometimes at the University of Utah.